Our world is normally silent in the face of evil - even when
that evil is overwhelming and apparent. At worst, many are
directly complicit in the maimings and slaughters. At best, the
murderers are merely ignored. It is in this persistently-defiled
world, in this altogether unchanging world, that Israel must now
make a fateful decision: Shall it continue to be a victim of
Palestinian terrorism, so as not to offend the generally uncaring
populations of the "civilized" world, or shall it begin
to use whatever force is required to remain alive?

Palestinian terrorism is unique both for its cowardice and for
its barbarism. Nonetheless, were Israel to depend upon the United
Nations or the United States or the European Community or the
broader "community of nations" for relief, its plea
would certainly fall upon deaf ears. This does not mean that
Israel has no lawful recourse to protect itself. On the contrary.
Recognizing the essentially decentralized nature of international
law, and the fundamental and unaltered right of states todefend
themselves from annihilation (a right strongly reaffirmed by
President Bush's ongoing NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY OF THE UNITED
STATES), the State of Israel now has every legal authority to
expunge the growing evil of Palestinian terror. It has, in short,
the clear legal right to cease being a victim and to become an
executioner.

Confronting what they call "our era of fear," the
writings of Albert Camus would have us all be "neither
victims nor executioners," living not in a world in which
killing has disappeared ("we are not so crazy as
that"), but one wherein killing has become illegitimate.
This is a fine philosophic expectation, to be sure, yet the
careful French philosopher did not anticipate an evil force for
whom utter extermination of the enemy was the only
"strategic" object - not even in a world living under
the shadow of Holocaust. What is more, Camus could assuredly
never have guessed that the "enemy" of this evil force
would once again be "The Jews." Were Israel to follow
Camus' reasoning, therefore, the effective result could only be
an enlargement of Jewish pain and suffering in the land, an
enlargement so boundless that it would usher in a new era of
genocide. Declining the right to act as a lawful executioner, the
State of Israel - beleaguered by unceasing and ever-more
destructive Arab terrorism, violence even likely to include
chemical and biological agents - would be forced by Camus'
impressive reasoning to accept its own destruction.

Why was Camus, who was thinking, of course, in the broadest
generic terms, and not about Israel in particular, so sorely
mistaken? Where, exactly, did he go wrong? By seeking an answer
to this question, Israel can now learn a great deal about its
uncertain survival.

My own answer to the question lies in Camus's presumption,
however implicit, of a natural reciprocity among human beings and
states in the matter of killing. We are asked to believe that as
greater numbers of people agree not to become executioners, still
greater numbers will follow upon the same course. In time, the
argument proceeds, the number of those who refuse to sanction
killing will become so great that there will be fewer and fewer
victims. The problem, of course, is that Camus' presumed
reciprocity does not exist, indeed, can never exist, all the more
so in the Islamic Middle East. Here the will to kill Jews will be
unimpressed by Israel's particular commitments to Reason and
Goodness, or by Israel's disproportionate contributions to
Science, Industry and Learning. Here there are no Arab plans for
a "Two-State Solution," only patently overt plans for a
decidedly Final Solution. It follows that Jewish executioners now
must have their distinctly rightful place in the government of
Israel, and that without them there will only be more and more
Jewish children's ashes to sweep from the country's oft-bloodied
streets.

In the next-to-best-of-all-possible-worlds for Israel (the
best of such worlds would be one where the Jewish State had no
murderous enemies at all), that country's most implacable foes
would subscribe to the settled norms of civilized international
behavior. Here negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians
might actually be sensible, and could even lead to generally
gainful agreements for all parties. But Israel does not live in
such an imaginary world; rather, it lives in a world wherein
Jerusalem's desperate demonstrations of civility are interpreted
by frenzied Arab enemies as weakness, and where dead Jews are
never a means to an end, but an end in themselves. In this real
Arab/Islamic world of butchery and bravado, a world where the
killing of Jews (all Jews; any Jews) is not only a firm religious
mandate but also a preferred path to both sexual ecstasy and
personal immortality, Jerusalem's unwillingness to use
appropriate massive force against terror always invites more
terror. At its heart, such unwillingness is taken as an open
invitation by Palestinian enemies to wage an heroic "Holy
War" against kindergartens, school busses and ice cream
parlors.

Traced back to its origins, the willful barbarism of Israel's
terrorist enemies is rooted in frightful Islamist attitudes
toward death, both individual and collective. So long as these
enemies see some remedy for their own unbearable mortality in the
killing of outsiders, in the killing of Jews, they will, as we
have seen so often, prepare gleefully to become executioners.
This leaves Israel with essentially three options: (1) create
conditions whereby Palestinian terrorist enemies of Israel can be
detached from their frightful pursuit of immortality; (2) create
conditions whereby these enemies can detach Final Solutions for
their overriding fears of death from the purposeful massacre of
Jews; or (3) create conditions whereby erroneous Israeli
presumptions about Reason and Goodness and Politics that have
spawned more and more Jewish victims are quickly discarded.

Options 1 and 2, of course, are beyond the realm of
possibility. Nothing Israel can do could ever affect its
terrorist enemies' most deeply-rooted orientations to death and
deliverance. Israel can only look seriously at Option 3, deciding
to accept it, and thereby to survive, or to reject it, and
thereby to die. Although the intellectuals and professors and
poets and artists and philosophers everywhere - many even in
Israel -would grieve audibly at such expressions of Israeli
"inhumanity," this grief would be little more than the
expected cry of those who have forgotten both History and Memory,
the insistent lamentation of those who would remain untouched by
both life and death. Significantly, this hideous lament would be
far easier for Israel to bear than the consequences of a
misplaced faith in Reason and Goodness, the sort of faith first
spawned by a stillborn wooden horse named "Oslo," and
presently reincarnated as the so-called "Road Map."

In the next-to-best-of-all-possible worlds for Israel, the
Jewish State could choose to be neither a victim nor an
executioner. But in the existing world, Israel and its
relentlessly murderous Palestinian enemies both operate amidst
the long-established rules of a balance-of-power global system.
In this terrible and terrorizing world, a world whose security
dynamics remain essentially what they have been since the Peace
of Westphalia in the seventeenth century and which will continue
to operate for the forseeable future, Israel must recognize that
it can easily be forced to disappear.

Sadly, as we learn from even scriptural sources, killing is
sometimes a sacred duty. Camus failed to acknowledge this, a
failure born of self-deception concerning human fears, human
possibilities, and human law. Faced with such fears and
possibilities, all law must rely, in the final analysis, on the
executioner. To deny the executioner his proper place, as the
ancient Israelites were well aware, is to deliver civilization to
the murderers and to construct entire mountains of new victims.

-------------------

LOUIS RENE BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) Professor Department
of Political Science, Purdue University lectures and publishes
widely on matters concerning international relations and
international law. His work on Israeli security matters is
well-known both in Israel and the United States. Prof. Beres is
the academic advisor to the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies.